Alumnus joins
NASA brass
NASA has appointed John M. Grunsfeld, SM’84, PhD’88,
new chief scientist at the agency’s Washington, DC, headquarters.
A veteran of four space-shuttle flights, Grunsfeld took part in
five spacewalks in 1999 and 2002 to upgrade and install equipment
in the Hubble Space Telescope. Earlier this year he was awarded
the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

They like how we do business
The University topped the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive’s
2003 rankings of corporate recruiters’ most respected MBA
programs. Chicago was named 5th-best business
school in the country, the No. 1 school for accounting and quantitative
analysis, and No. 2 for finance. More than 2,000 corporate recruiters
participated in the survey.

The wages of philosophy
Leszek Kolakowski, professor of philosophy at Oxford University
and professor emeritus in Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought,
has received the first $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime
achievement in the humanities. Kolakowski’s anticommunist
writings assert the necessity of freedom and diversity against Marxist
ideology.

Law for life
The Alabama Supreme Court has reversed the sentence of Phillip Tomlin,
a death-row inmate since 1978. U of C law professor Bernard Harcourt,
representing Tomlin pro bono, argued that the trial-court judge
had improperly overridden the jury’s unanimous recommendation
of life imprisonment without possibility of parole. The October
3 decision, known as ex parte Tomlin, is among the first
to establish a standard of review for judicial override in Alabama.
The U.S. Supreme Court had previously ruled that the judiciary was
not constitutionally required to adopt such a standard.

Prizes for patriots
Chicago alumni have received three of four $250,000 prizes from
the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation for promoting liberal democracy
and American ideals. The recipients are Leon Kass, SB’58,
MD’62, currently on leave from the Committee on Social Thought
to chair President Bush’s Council on Bioethics; Mary Ann Glendon,
AB’59, JD’61, the Learned Hand professor of law at Harvard
University; and Thomas Sowell, PhD’68, the Rose and Milton
Friedman senior fellow in public policy at the Hoover Institution
on War, Revolution, and Peace.

I’m a doctor, and
I play one on TV
In February 2004 the Discovery Health Channel will premiere Chicago’s
Lifeline, a reality-TV series taping at the University of Chicago
Hospitals since August. The show’s producers at Morningstar
Entertainment hope to find remarkable medical cases as well as “characters”
among the physicians and staff.

Props for particle project
The American Physical Society gave its 2004 Leroy Apker Award in
undergraduate physics to Peter Onyisi, AB’03, for his paper,
“Looking for New Invisible Particles,” published last
fall in Physical Review Letters. As a fourth-year Onyisi
was chosen to collaborate with 700 other researchers working on
the Collider Detector at Fermilab project. He is now a doctoral
student at Cornell.

New deputy dean
The University has appointed Martina Munsters deputy dean of students
for student affairs. Munsters, who was previously the associate
director of student affairs for the Graduate School of Business
doctoral program, will guide four department directors in charge
of health, student, graduate, and international affairs.

On justice in wartime
Geoffrey Stone, JD’71, the Harry Kalven Jr. distinguished
service professor in the Law School, coauthored an amicus curiae
brief for the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to review the constitutionality
of the Bush administration’s prolonged detention of Muslims
without judicial hearings. Citing past episodes of curtailed civil
liberties, Stone filed the October 3 brief on behalf of Fred Korematsu,
who was arrested in 1942 and convicted of defying the government’s
WW II internment order for Japanese Americans. Stone’s study
of wartime civil liberties, The Secret of Liberty, will
be published early in 2004 by W. W. Norton and Co.

Business guru honored
Ronald Coase, senior fellow and the Clifton R. Musser professor
emeritus in the Law School, has received the “No Boundaries”
Award for Innovation by the Economist magazine. Coase’s
70 years of theoretical work on business processes, transaction
costs, and property rights was credited with creating new markets
for intangible commodities, such as radio-frequency spectrum auctions
in the wireless-communications industry and tradable emissions permits,
which regulate the financial burdens of industrial pollution. Coase
won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Good fellows of science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has named
nine Chicago professors 2003 fellows: Ian Foster and Rick Stevens,
professors of computer science and directors at Argonne National
Laboratory; Joseph Lykken and Bruce Winstein, professors of physics;
Viresh Rawal and Hisashi Yamamoto, professors of chemistry; Vinay
Kumar, professor and chair of pathology; Stephan Meyer, professor
of astronomy & astrophysics; and Russell Tuttle, professor of
anthropology.